Clothing

Scratch and sniff. That's the story of wool, yesterday and today. The former is the old wool, the clothing of itchy necks, overheating and Michelin Man bulk. The latter is the new one: soft as peach fuzz, toss it in the washer, odorless. After a two-decade assault by the makers of synthetic materials, wool is making a comeback. "What's old is new," says Pete Gilmore of Eastern Mountain Sports, a major outdoors outfitter. "Wool never totally went away, but it's coming back with a new spin."

It's been a tough year for Mary Mack. During the warmer months she traveled with carnivals, but lean times meant fewer dollars spent on "Pick-a-Duck" and "Shoot-A-Cup," the games she operates. When Mack and her husband returned to Baltimore in the fall, they had $200 and no place to go. For several weeks, they slept on the ground outside her aunt's shed. "We just live day by day, whatever we can do," said Mack, adding that Christmas was "terrible" this year. "We had nothing." On Sunday, Mack and family members joined hundreds of others to receive free clothing, housewares and toys given away by a nonprofit group under a Jones Falls Expressway bridge.

"I wish I knew it was going to be this warm," Mark Newton says in his far-from-home British accent. The Blue Ridge Mountains have broken out in their seasonal rash of autumnal colors, but the thermometer reads almost sixty today. Newton pauses under a canopy of trees to remove his backpack, then whips off his hiking hat and tucks it inside. He sheds a T-shirt, leaving only his nylon pullover. He is sweating heavily, something he takes very seriously, as if his skin has sprung a leak. Highly inefficient.

L orraine L. Stutman, whose popular Roland Park clothing consignment shop kept women dressed in glamorous designer clothing for 40 years, died of heart failure Nov. 3 at St. Elizabeth Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Southwest Baltimore. She was 90 and had lived on Park Heights Avenue. Lorraine Libby Titelman, the daughter of a tailor and homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised in the 2300 block of Guilford Ave. After graduating from Eastern High School in 1937, she went to work as a secretary.

As Hailey and Chelsey Alder ran out the back door of the Shepherd's Staff center in Westminster, they carried new backpacks filled with school supplies. Alongside their mother, Jaymi Bryant, 23, of Union Bridge, the girls entered a large shed and searched through hundreds of pieces of clothing for the four outfits each child could take home for free. Hailey, who is almost 6, and Chelsey, 5, are getting ready to start first grade and kindergarten, respectively, at Elmer A. Wolfe Elementary in Union Bridge.

Margaret Cho's well-publicized battles with the bulge came to a head in 1994, when one of the producers of her short-lived sitcom, All-American Girl, decided her face was too big and dispatched a team to help her lose weight. A personal trainer worked her out four hours each day, six days a week. A nutritionist restricted her diet to yogurt and fruit. In two weeks, she lost 30 pounds -- and almost her life when her kidneys failed during filming. In the end, all it got her was a canceled show, an addiction to diet pills and alcohol, and years of yo-yo dieting.

Alice Roi's personal taste ranges from long underwear from Wal-Mart to togs from Chanel. That yawning gap between the mundane and the fabulous, and the street and the runway, is where 27-year-old Roi, one of a handful of fresh-faced New York-based designers catapulting into the fashion business, seems most comfortable, having grown up in a city where poverty and wealth coexist on a grand scale. And the clothes she creates -- as well as the ones she wears -- have the same quirky split personality that is spurring celebrities and major retailers to embrace her collections.

Richard Cohn eyed the back of the grey Canali suit jacket and smoothed the fabric on Frederick Bianco's shoulders. They stood before full-length mirrors joking about Bianco's penchant for having his shirts altered to expose the sleeves just so. Bianco, a customer of Pikesville's J.S. Edwards for 15 years, expects this level of rapport with Cohn, a sales associate, and other employees of the high-end menswear boutique. "I come here for the personal service," said Bianco, who works in film and does voice-overs.